The Brady can be summed up as a parking and trash facility with apartments attached. Units are basic and decent. Aside from the leasing office and pool area, it generally has a prison aesthetic, and is in pretty bad shape. New paint job is awful and incomplete - get your money back on that.
Looking at The Brady from the street, based on the dated aesthetic you might expect it to be a 10 year old building. Once inside, because of the giant, poorly patched cracks in the sheetrock and concrete, and how uneven the paint is, you might assume it's a 20 year old building. It's not. It's only 3.5 years old. It's not due to poor maintenance or bad management; the building is a failure by design - that's the key thing.
It's probably a decent lesson in the consequences of under budgeting, bad project management, and inexperience. There are a lot of decisions that probably saved marginal costs during construction that resulted in unnecessary regular operational and maintenance costs, and the dump that The Brady is today.
On the plus side:
Management are really nice and the maintenance crew are really good, considering how much unnecessary work they need to do.
Nest thermostat.
Package management is OK.
The neighbourhood is decent with a lot of restaurants etc, if no good urban market.
Several bus routes.
Washer and dryer in units.
Dishwasher is OK.
The gym is ok.
The pool is nice, but I don't use it.
On the down side:
Building is dirty and beat up.
Elevators break regularly.
Fire alarms go off a lot.
Area power goes out a fair amount.
Cabinets and floor are dated.
Fixtures and hardware are really cheap.
Wiring issues.
Lots of 'settling' of the building.
No dimmers on lights.
Crappy cheap CFL lightbulbs (non-standard base) are used instead of LEDs.
Only one outlet in the bathroom.
The toilets are cheap & barely work.
No light in the laundry closet, or in dryer.
Cheap bottom of the line Kenmore kitchen appliances clad in stainless.
Washer and dryer aren't great & have issues.
Refrigerator is very basic and pretty unreliable.
The kitchen has no exhaust, but a useless recirculating 'filter' on the microwave that shoots all that grease, etc into the upper cabinets, causes smoke alarm to go off. You can't cook here.
Kitchen sink is deep, but the faucet is low and short, making it pointless.
The bedroom has cheap gross wall-to-wall carpeting.
The walk in closet is the only place for storage, and isn't insulated, so it gets hot and humid in summer and freezing in winter.
No place for a mop, vacuum, etc. If I have to improvise my living space, it's not 'luxury'.
No free guest parking.
Parking is a nightmare generally.
Parking garage is extremely cramped. Cars can barely pass going opposite directions. You will scrape your vehicle eventually.
It's a noisy building - hallway, parking garage(!), etc.
Common area lights aren't maintained.
String lights over courtyard are 40% burnt out.
Hallway light fixtures have been trashed for the last year.
Hallway floors are always filthy and are 'cleaned' with a machine that just gets them wet..and bangs up the walls and doors.
Hallway walls were just repainted, but not well. Splotchy, uneven, and incomplete - it needs another coat.
At move in you will realize that move-in was not considered at all in the design of this building.
First, there's no place for a moving van. There is an area on one side of the parking garage that would have been ideal for that, but thanks to lack of design consideration, that isn't a thing. There is an on-street loading zone that's used by the restaurants that you're supposed to use, if it's available.
The second thing you'll need to deal with is that there is no service elevator. You'll need to use the parking garage passenger elevator, which for indiscernible reasons, has a small 'elevator lobby' with a door you have to get through at a right angle. The elevator is gross and beat to crap, as is the elevator lobby from being banged by furniture. The elevator does not smell like pee, but looks like it should. You are met with a right angle jog at every damn entrance.
The Brady is wood construction on a platform. The building hallway and stairwell floors are painted masonry on a subfloor, and the walls are sheetrock. Stairs are steel with concrete treads.
Publicly observable issues in the last 18 months have included water entry damage, pooling water, brick facade falling off, significant sheetrock cracking, peeling paint, significant masonry cracks, regular door hardware failure. read more